Editor's Letter

Annie Get Your Passport

Before Bono takes the floor, I want to say a few words about our esteemed guest editor and how this special issue on Africa came about. We first met at a small dinner given by Robert De Niro sometime after 9/11. Bono was a difficult man not to like. And who didn't admire what he had done with his fortune and fame: marshaling the forces available to someone in his position in a serious crusade for debt cancellation and for eradication of H.I.V./aids in Africa. Over the next five years his name, which once appeared only in the entertainment sections of the newspaper, began to pop up with increasing frequency in the business pages and international-news section. Earlier this year, Mark Dowley, a marketing polymath at the Endeavor talent agency who has been involved with Bono's (Red) campaign from the start, called to inquire if I would be interested in having him guest-edit an issue of the magazine.

Interested? I'll say! I confess my initial thought was that I could take the month off and work on my tennis game, such as it is. Plus: it's Bono! But with the issue now sent to the printer, I can state unequivocally that having a co-editor does not eliminate your duties, or even halve them. If the guest editor takes his duties seriously, it triples, quadruples the work. And Bono's engagement with the issue was full-on; so much so that there were days when I wished he had phoned it in. He read every story and every headline in the issue, and his suggestions were always thought through and helpful. Time differences were never a problem, and when he was on the road he spent hours on the phone or e-mail dealing with this query or that. Bless him, he even wore a tie to the office. Bono is not only passionate about Africa, he is also incredibly well informed. Interestingly, in what is now Ghana, there was once a mini-empire called Bono, ruled by kings called Bonohene. Our Bonohene was a wonderful collaborator—quick, smart, generous to a fault, and always willing to laugh at himself. That he is genuinely funny and a storyteller with a great gift for mimicry made the experience that much more memorable.

When an article about Bono guest-editing this issue appeared in The New York Times, an unprecedented torrent of story ideas—sometimes dozens in a single day—poured in from photographers, writers, and non-governmental organizations. Most of them were substantive and interesting. (Many of those who wrote mentioned their "good friend Bono"—and I have no reason to believe they were exaggerating, given the expanse of his embracing arms.) This is but a single issue of the magazine, however, and it was heartbreaking to turn so many down, though a number of them found their way to the VF.com interactive map.

April 13: Shoots GEORGE W. BUSH and CONDOLEEZZA RICE; Washington to New York (230 miles).

April 16–17: Editing photos.

April 18: New York to Chicago (740 miles); shoots OPRAH WINFREY; Chicago to Washington (575 miles).

April 19: Shoots BARACK OBAMA; Washington to New York (230 miles).

April 20: Shoots CHRIS ROCK.

April 25: New York to Los Angeles (2,470 miles); shoots BRAD PITT and DON CHEADLE; Los Angeles to New York (2,470 miles).

April 26: New York to Seoul, South Korea (6,870 miles).

April 27: Seoul to Osaka, Japan (520 miles).

April 28: Shoots ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU in Kobe, Japan.

April 29: Japan to London (5,920 miles).

April 30: Shoots 20th and final cover, MADONNA, in London. London to New York (3,440 miles).

Total mileage: 47,835 miles, almost two times the circumference of the earth.

The brunt of the organizing chores fell to deputy editor Aimée Bell, a colleague for nearly 20 years and the one I turn to when a big project requires expert hands. Aimée is a serial obsessive, an editor who can learn everything about one subject, produce a special report on it, then ramp up on something completely different the next month. She edited our Swinging London portfolio in 1997 and our Young Royals special issue almost four years back. She also worked on our Art Issue last December and guides the annual International Best-Dressed List package in our September issues. From his end, Bono turned to his Aimée: Sheila Roche. For three months, Aimée and Sheila worked to make this issue happen.

Some of Vanity Fair's best storytellers have reports this month: Christopher Hitchens, Sebastian Junger, William Langewiesche, and Alex Shoumatoff. Bill Clinton is here, writing about his friend Nelson Mandela. And so is Brad Pitt, who conducts an informed and entertaining interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. A new voice in the magazine this issue is that of Tom Freston, a founder of MTV and the former president and C.E.O. of Viacom. Freston is an inveterate traveler, and when he told me that he and his pals Jimmy Buffett and Chris Blackwell were heading to Timbuktu, in West Africa's Mali, for a rock concert at which many of the attendees arrive by camel, I asked him to keep a journal of the trip. Tom's report is a charming and evocative dispatch. It is always nice when you can give a young writer a leg up in his career.

Bono, Annie Leibovitz, and I sketched out the idea for the cover—or, rather, covers—the first week of March. The notion was to have one person on the cover tell something to another person on the cover, who would then tell something else to the person on the next cover, and so on. We decided that 20 different covers had a nice ring to it. That meant 20 individual photo shoots. It took a few days to come up with a roster, but once we did, the staff, including Bono, went to work. During one of our meetings his cell phone went off and he began talking to a "Carl" someone as he took the call outside my office. This Carl, I discovered, was Karl, as in Rove, and Bono was working to secure our good president for one of the covers. (Bono's choice, not mine, as you might imagine; he gives the commander in chief high marks on his Africa policies.)

By the second week in March, we had the majority of our cover subjects lined up. For the next month and a half, this was Leibovitz's travel schedule: New York to Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Winston-Salem to Greenville, South Carolina; Greenville to New York; New York to London; London to Dublin; Dublin to Chicago; Chicago to Seattle; Seattle to New York; New York to Los Angeles; Los Angeles to Turks and Caicos (for last month's story on Bruce Willis); Turks and Caicos to New York; New York to Los Angeles; Los Angeles to Phoenix; Phoenix to Omaha; Omaha to Washington, D.C.; Washington to New York; New York to Chicago; Chicago to Washington; Washington to New York; New York to Los Angeles; Los Angeles to New York; New York to Seoul, South Korea; Seoul to Osaka, Japan; Osaka to London; London to New York. I got tired just typing that.

On our masthead, you will see that many of the staff's names have little letters and numbers attached to them. This is because we asked Spencer Wells, who heads up the Genographic Project for the National Geographic Society and IBM, to take our DNA samples so that he could chart our individual ancestral paths from their starting point in East Africa. As Wells says, "We are all alive today because of what happened to a small group of hungry Africans around 50,000 years ago." It is quite moving to see that every person on the planet is linked to this African tribe, and that, as the saying goes, we are all African. I submitted a DNA sample, as did Bono, and we discovered that we have remarkably similar genographic paths on our fathers' sides. V.F. asked a number of our cover subjects if they wanted to try it as well. George Clooney said he would consider it, but that he was worried we were just trying to find out if he was the father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby.

Graydon Carter is the editor of Vanity Fair. His books include What We've Lost (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Oscar Night: 75 Years of Hollywood Parties (Knopf).